Body Empowerment From The Inside Out By Sydney Rose I’ll never forget the moment I found out that I had enviable eyelids. I was 15 and a friend of mine was reading a blog about makeup. “You’re lucky,” she said “I wish my eyelids creased twice.” It was like a new world had opened up to me. Before that moment I had literally no idea that something could be right or wrong with my eyelids.…

How Self Awareness Improves Body Image By Liah Rozenman How and why chronic negative body image arises (or can worsen) over time is accounted for due to multiple factors: messages we get when we are young from caregivers and our community in the form of we see, hear and read. We get additional messages through advertising, the entertainment industry, fashion industry, social media, and so on. Entire movements, like ‘body positivity’, have arisen to address…

Self-Empowerment and Authenticity What does it mean to live our lives authentically? How does self-empowerment help us lead an authentic life? Christine (Chris) Vargo, LCSW shares her journey towards self-empowerment and how this process, both personally and professionally has led her to find what effectively helps others to access more of their authentic self. I started my own path to empowerment and living a more authentic life after several experiences forced me to reflect on…

GET OUT: How to avoid the worst therapy ever. (spoiler alert!) What is “good” therapy anyway? By Adrienne Glasser LCSW, RDMT In order to understand what good, helpful therapy looks like, it helps to examine the worst of the worst …when psychotherapy goes horribly wrong. When most people first enter therapy have very little idea what to expect. Most common associations about psychotherapy come from movies and TV shows. Depictions run the gamut from ineffective, to harmful,…

Making Friends with Feelings By Ines Guariguata, LCSW, LCAT, ATR-BC, SEP Feelings seem like a therapist’s favorite subject. It is the realm we supposedly feel most comfortable in, the one we love to observe, describe, catalog and glean meaning from. Yet, even for a therapist, feelings are not so ‘comfortable’ to be with. I sit with feelings, my clients’ and my own, daily. I witness how feelings can take up so much space in a…

For The Young and The Busy: 5 Ways To Practice Mindfulness On The Go by Lily Leiber, MPS, LCAT, ATR-BC “Half an hour’s meditation is essential except when you are very busy. Then a full hour is needed.” –Francis de Sales When I first read this quote, I chuckled. This was the antithesis of what I did. When waking up in the morning with a to-do list on an ever-expanding loop, I would jolt out…

Lift Shame! Finally Love Yourself And Others This Valentine’s Day With Your Inner Activist The Inner Activist Part 2 On Valentine’s Day and most days, we hear a lot about loving ourselves. What the heck does this actually mean?! I used to think that loving myself, my body and everything about me meant that I was going to be the most confident person ever and would look in the mirror and say “Damn, I rock…

Anger, Sadness and Fear: Finding Your Inner Activist Part 1 By Adrienne Glasser LCSW We all have fear right now. We all have anger and sadness. I am you. I too have felt scared and angry at what is happening right now in politics, but the question I am always left with is: “What can I do?” It’s very tempting to just jump into action. That sometimes means defending yourself and others on Facebook, angrily…

Stop Making Resolutions! How to Create Actual Change in the New Year By Allison Abrams, LCSW-R Each year, as evidenced by the rise in gym memberships during the month of January, many of us partake in a process of magical thinking, otherwise known as New Year’s resolutions. In an attempt to cure our holiday remorse, we resolve to fix the ‘damage’ we feel we’ve done to ourselves, either through too much food and libations or other…

Balance Is a Myth: 5 Steps Towards Knowing Your Flow I don’t know about you but this time of year can feel utterly chaotic to me. I feel a struggle with over-commitments, winter blues, political blues, and colds upon colds. In one week I had 5 holiday commitments, 4 doctors appointments (between the dog, myself and my child,) 3 huge work projects, food poisoning, and a partridge in a pear tree! It’s not just me though.…